


garrison buddies and altean nail polish

by viscrael



Series: trans girl pidge hc [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Trans Female Character, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt, doin their nails and talkin bout family, pidge n lance bein friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 11:40:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11417205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscrael/pseuds/viscrael
Summary: “Lance, why did you ask me to hang out with you?”





	garrison buddies and altean nail polish

**Author's Note:**

> back at it again w the trans girl pidge!! its been yrs since the last one in this series but i was hit with a sudden and intense love for vld again so. i spit this out
> 
> the next in this series might be a short lil thing involving pidge n hunk being friends. im probably gonna cycle thru all the main characters honestly ? bc i have an idea for shiro and allura too, so like.........it might just end up that way lmao
> 
> i pulled some names for lances siblings right outta my ass but if uve read my other vld fics u might notice that i reused the names chloe and stephanie. honestly its just bc im lazy tbh

“I don’t think that’s my color.”

“Anything’s your color,” Lance says, not looking up from his work. “You just have to _make_ it your color.”

Pidge rolls her eyes. “I don’t think that’s how that works.”

“Oh, c’mon, Pidge. Just trust me on this.”

“Statistically speaking that’s not really worked out for me,” she mumbles. Despite her words, she doesn’t protest anymore, and she doesn’t take her hand away from where Lance is holding it with his right. He’s hunched over her hand, holding a nail polish brush as he paints her nails with surprising intensity. It’s a fuchsia color, one that Pidge doesn’t think she’s ever worn before. She’s only wearing it now because Lance insisted.

She’s only doing this at _all_ because Lance insisted, honestly. When he found her tinkering with some of the castle’s systems after dinner to ask if she wanted to dick around with him, she hadn’t really known what to expect. At the Garrison, “dick around” meant “sneak out and find some girls to flirt with all night,” or possibly “pull a prank on Iverson for the third time that month and pray they don’t get caught.” But here, in a ten-thousand-plus-year-old castle/ship flying through space billions of lightyears away from Earth and home, those aren’t options, and Lance hadn’t mentioned any activities in specific.

The past few days have been…oddly quiet. The time between missions is like that, Pidge has found. The paladins get a little restless when they’re given a little too much free, and she knows that now is one of those time when everyone’s feeling antsy, unsure how to handle the downtime between saving the world. She wasn’t surprised that Lance wanted to do something, only that he had asked _her_ to do it _with_ him.

But she’d agreed anyway. And here they were, sitting cross-legged across from each other on the lounge’s couch, a stack of alien nail polish sitting between them that Pidge can only guess Allura gave to Lance. Lance has already painted his own nails a dark blue color. The polish shimmers like a mirage, similar to galaxy polish on steroids, and she can only assume that’s the Altean nature of it.

“Alright,” Lance says, finally sitting up straight. He’s finished Pidge’s left hand. “Lookin’ good, if I do say so myself. Other hand, s’il vous plait.”

Pidge holds out her right hand to him, and he takes it. He manipulates her hand until it’s in the position he wants, starting at her thumb. He paints quickly but carefully somehow, avoiding getting any polish on her skin at all.

“How are you so good at this?” she mumbles, squinting as she watches him work. He moves to her index finger.

“I have four sisters, three of which are younger and all of which wanted me to play dress up with them constantly growing up,” he says, shrugging. “After a while, I started just painting my nails myself ‘cause, you know, why not. It’s fun and it looks good, so.” He holds out his free hand and wiggles his fingers for her to see.

“I didn’t know that,” Pidge says. “What are they like?”

“Who, my sisters?”

She nods.

Lance grins. “They’re the worst. Chloe’s the oldest—she’s twenty-three—and she was _really_ mean to me as a kid, ‘cause I took all the attention away from here when I was born and she did _not_ like that at all. We weren’t friends until she was, like, twelve, I think? But, yeah, she’s studying medicine right now.”

Pidge listens as he goes on, moving on to her middle finger, then her ring, applying at least four layers to each nail individually.

“Stephanie’s next,” he continues. “She’s only a year younger than me, and she’s kind of a menace, too, but she’s also basically my best friend. Then there’s Bridget, who just turned thirteen. She’s the quietest of all of us, I think, and she’s ridiculously creative. Growing up she was always stuck in this headspace, you know, making up stories and characters and worlds so much that she kinda had trouble making friends. And there’s Lauren, who’s nine and twins with my little brother Ethan.”

“How many people are in your family exactly?” Pidge asks. Lance, done with her right hand, puts the brush back in the nail polish bottle, screwing it shut.

“My siblings and my mom and dad, so eight.”

“...Wow."

“You should see us at Christmas if that’s impressive,” he laughs. He starts to say something, but the smile falls from his face and he pauses with his mouth open. After a second, he clears his throat. “Just tell me if this is bad to bring up, but, uh, what about you and your family?”

“What about my family at Christmas?”

“Yeah. Or, well, anything about them, I guess. You’ve just never really talked about them before, I realized. Obviously if you’d rather not talk about it, that’s cool, I totally get it, but…” he trails off awkwardly, offering a shrug and looking down at his crossed legs. He’s wearing short, blue and yellow pajama shorts, a white t-shirt, and his bed robe. All the paladins were given pajamas and extra pairs of clothes from Coran and Allura after they got here, but Lance and Hunk were the only ones to take the official Altean pajamas. Everyone else stuck with the simpler options.

“Well, my whole family’s Jewish, for one,” she says.

“Oh, what, really? That’s cool. I didn’t know that.”

“Well, yeah. You just said yourself that you don’t know anything about them.”

Lance kinds of smiles like he’s not sure what to say to that. Pidge looks away and goes to push her glasses up on the bridge of her nose before she realizes that she’s not wearing them; she lowers her hand casually, trying to look like she hadn’t just made that mistake.

“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to sound rude. I’m just kind of…” She sighs. “Lance, why did you ask me to hang out with you?”

“What do you mean?” He fidgets. “Can’t I wanna hang out with my old Garrison buddy?”

“Uh, not when you never have _before_. No offense, but this is kind of out of the blue. Excuse me if I’m kinda confused.”

For a moment, it looks like Lance is debating what to say to that, his lips pressed tightly together and his back straight. He folds his hands in his lap and lets his shoulders slump.

“Alright, alright, you got me,” he says. “The truth is, I…just wanted to apologize.”

Pidge’s eyebrows shoot up. “Apologize? For what?”

“For not realizing you’re a girl sooner. I mean, I was basically the only one who didn’t catch on, so I’m kinda the reason you felt you needed to have an actual conversation with everyone at all…”

Pidge pauses. In all actuality, she would’ve had that conversation even if Lance _had_ known like everyone else. At the time that she talked to them, the only person she knew was aware was Shiro. She hadn’t expected everyone (except for Lance) to tell her that they _already_ knew. And yeah, it would’ve felt nice if Lance had been in on that too, but she hadn’t blamed him when he was confused. It just meant that her disguise at the Garrison had worked.

“It’s not like it’s your fault I was trying to hide it,” is what she ends up saying. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, Lance, I’m sure,” she says. Despite her tone, she’s not actually that annoyed. She looks down at her still-wet nails. “So…what, you decided to apologize for not realizing I was a girl by…painting our nails together?”

“Yeah!” He grins. “Also, ‘cause I wanted to try out this weird Altean nail polish. I had to explain the whole concept of nail polish before Allura understood. The word they have for it’s, like, ridiculously literal.”

“Ours just means polish for your nails,” Pidge points out.

“Well, _yeah_ , but…”

She smiles a little and lets Lance go on like that for a while, going from the foreign nature of the Altean language to something Hunk said the other day to a story with his brother Ethan from years ago. He talks with his hands, waving them around as he goes, getting far too into the story telling aspect of it. Pidge just sits and listens, blowing on her nails so they’ll dry quicker. She’s never been hyper feminine, even immediately following the days she came out, but one thing she’s always kind of liked is painting her nails. She doesn’t tell Lance this, though.

The conversation steers back to family again. Lance says gently, “Your brother…”

She sits up straighter. “What about him?”

“How old is he?”

It’s dumb how she appreciates the use of the present tense. It’s dumb that she notices that detail at all. “Eighteen. Nineteen in September.”

“Sorry,” Lance says again.

“Stop apologizing,” she says immediately. “If I didn’t want to talk about it, I wouldn’t answer. You don’t have to, like, walk on eggshells or something around me, alright?”

“Alright.”

They’re quiet after that. Pidge looks down at her hands. Because Allura has a good half-foot over Pidge in height, the clothes she’d lent Pidge are big on her; her blue sleep shirt comes down past her thighs, almost covering her shorts, and the heels of her socks sit on her ankles. She’s always been small for her age, but she’s even more aware of it now, sitting in the silence while Lance looks a little bit like a kicked puppy.

“He used to do this with me,” Pidge says finally. Lance doesn’t say anything, letting her speak. “Paint our nails together, I mean. He was the first one I ever told I’m a girl. When I finally came out to our parents and stuff, he’d do things like that with me—braid my hair even if it wasn’t really long enough, paint each other’s nails. I think his friends kind of made fun of him for it since he’d go to school like that, but he never complained, and when I brought it up he’d just pretend it wasn’t a big deal. He was the one to tell me what being transgender actually is.”

“He sounds like a good guy,” Lance says quietly.

Pidge smiles. “He is. He can be an asshole, but he tries his best.”

“You miss him?”

“Well, duh.”

Lance nods. “Me too. I miss my siblings too, I mean. I know it’s a different situation, but…”

“I get it,” Pidge nods too.

They sit there, neither sure how to follow up that exchange, what would do it justice—if anything _could_ do it justice.

“I’m going to find them,” Pidge says quietly. “I’m not gonna give up. Not until they’re back home, safe.”

“I get it.” Lance sucks in a breath. “I get it.”


End file.
